THE BEE MAN OF BARRINGTON

How Brian Thompson turned a childhood fascination with honeybees into a thriving family business in the northwest suburbs.

Long before Honey Lake Bee Company became a thriving family business in the Barrington area, co-owner Brian Thomson was just a kid fascinated with bees.

The bees have just always had a way of finding him.

“All through junior high and high school, I was known as the bee man,” the Michigan native shares about life before moving to Barrington nearly 30 years ago. “I would actually bring live beehives to school with me for show and tell.”

Today, Thomson and his team care for more than 220 hives spread throughout the Barrington area, producing everything from honey and beeswax to creams, salves, and candles for the growing fanbase of Honey Lake Bee Company.

And a few of those hives are sitting right in his own backyard.

“We have three to five hives here, but most of our hives are on other people’s property, everywhere from Barrington Hills to Lake Barrington to Lake Zurich,” says Thomson, who named the company after an actual lake in North Barrington. “We even have some hives on top of the Abt Appliance store.”

Each and every summer, the real work begins.

“I try to get to each hive at least every seven to 10 days, so we’ll do 20 to 30 hives in a day,” says Thomson, who served as a golf course superintendent in the northwest suburbs for about 24 years before putting his full-time efforts into Honey Lake Bee Company back in 2020.

The bounty of those hives goes on to help Honey Lake Bee Company produce a broad range of products, especially some rather unexpected ones such as creamed honey, lip balms, and honey straws. “We sell online to customers as far as Alaska,” says Thomson, who now works alongside his wife, Karen, and son, Colin, on the day-to-day operations of Honey Lake Bee Company.

And rest assured, everything collected from the hives is used. “Beekeepers are the ultimate recyclers,” he says with a laugh. “Nothing goes to waste.”

Thomson says Honey Lake Bee Company has also built a loyal customer base around the purity of its products. “We sell very pure products, and in the bee world, it’s hard to find truly pure products,” he says.

Granted, Thomson says modern beekeeping has become far more challenging over the years due to destructive mites that have devastated honeybee populations throughout North America. “You’re managing a bug and a bug,” he explains with a smile. “And it’s a bug you can barely even see.”

And while the retail portion of Honey Lake Bee Company continues to thrive, Thomson admits that it’s not the part he loves the most. Rather, for Thomson, one of the most important aspects to his company is the chance to teach others about the art of beekeeping, as he too was taught all he now knows.

“I was lucky that I had some older gentlemen who were mentors for me and who took me under their wing,” says Thomson. “I enjoy teaching several beekeeping classes. I enjoy talking to other beekeepers and helping them. It’s challenging, but it’s fun to help people succeed as beginning beekeepers.”

He also loves getting to chat with his customers at various farmer’s markets in Palatine, Evanston, Buffalo Grove, Skokie, Northbrook, and Crystal Lake. “I think our customers really appreciate that personal connection that we have with them,” says Thomson.

That personal connection looks to grow even further later this year, when Thomson says Honey Lake Bee Company will be opening its own storefront in Lake Barrington.

“We just have outgrown being able to do this from our home,” he says. “This is really a dream of Karen and mine to have a store where we can have all of our customers and really showcase all of our products and be able to teach classes from beekeeping to mead and candle making, to soap making, to all the other things that are associated with bees.”

The store will also feature what Thomson is calling a true ‘bee experience.’

“People can come and they’ll put on a bee suit, and we’ll go and open up live beehives so they can really see them up close and personal,” he says. “Just to watch their expressions when they’re holding a frame of bees is really something. People who are deathly afraid of bees, at the end of it, have conquered that fear and now they have a completely different understanding of honeybees and the beauty of them.”

And hopefully, they won’t get stung.

“I still get stung, usually daily, working with the bees,” says Thomson. “But you kind of build up a tolerance to it. Every now and then they catch you off guard or you get stung on the lip or the face and those can kind of hurt. But getting stung on the hands or arms is pretty routine.”

But it’s all worth it.

“Bees are amazing creatures,” he says. “They’re very smart. They’re always teaching us.”

For more information, including opportunities to sign up for beginning beekeeping classes, visit honeylakebeecompany.com.